Initial Findings

1 Introduction

Buffalo, New York is a city on lake Erie that has much potential. It boasts beautiful views of the water, borders Canada, accesses Niagara Falls, and the people are kind and passionate about their sports. However, it suffers from high crime rates. As of 2025, Buffalo has the highest crime rate, 1,147 per 100,000 people, in the state of New York (Cambell 2025). Part of this reasoning is the quality of education in the city.

The education levels of Buffalo are interesting due to past racial segregation. While the higher income neighborhoods have above national average rates, the lower income and minority communities are well below average (Brief 2018). Consistently, the city of Buffalo has lowest graduation rates when compared against the surrounding areas (Brief 2018). Since the education level is the lowest in the region and the crime rates are the highest, the hypothesis that will be tested states: the crime rates in the city are high as a result of the city’s lower education levels.

2 Figure 1: Crimes by Tract 2024

Figure 1 ¹

3 Figure 2: Time Series of Education

Figure 2 ²

4 Results

Both charts are able to produce insights from the data. In Figure 1, the chart shows the number of crimes by census tracts in the year 2024. As the color becomes lighter, it indicates that more crimes are committed. The map is helpful in creating a visual of each census tract and it is easy to determine the safer areas. The color that is the lightest is downtown buffalo, census tract 016500. Since this has the highest number of committed crimes, it will be interesting to see how the education levels are affected for this area.

Figure 2 shows a time series plot of the percentage of children enrolled in some form of school. As for the lower grade levels, for example Preschool and Kindergarten, the percents remain consistent over the years. In addition, children in elementary and middle school remained enrolled at a consistently high rate. It is not until high school and college level educations are studied that there is an indication of a decline. Over the years, the rate of enrollment has slowly been decreasing between the two. In addition, they follow a the same patterns. It shows that the rate of students are dropping. Since these people are older than the other levels, it leads to questions like are absences and drop out rates increasing and why the decrease.

Throughout this study, more information will need to be found to determine why enrollment rates are decreasing and if they are specific to census tracts. If so, are the census tracts will lower employment seeing an increase of crime? Furthermore, multivariate models will be used to determine the significance of these factors when predicting crime rates. It will include the year, census tracts, education levels, and test scores. By doing so, the coefficient will help to determine the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. In the end, the hypothesis, determining if education is significant to crime in the city of Buffalo, will be accepted or rejected.

5 References

al, Yihui Xie et. 2025. Knitr: A General-Purpose Package for Dynamic Report Generation in r. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/knitr/index.html.

Allaire, J. J., Charles Teague, Carlos Scheidegger, Yihui Xie, and Christophe Dervieux. 2022. “Quarto: R Interface to ’Quarto’ Markdown Publishing System.” https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=quarto.

Brief, Buffalo. 2018. “Public Education in Buffalo and the Region.” https://ppgbuffalo.org/files/documents/education/public_education_in_buffalo_and_the_region_buffalo_brief_may_2018.pdf.

Bureau of Census, Commerce. 2025. “Census Tracts 2020.” Open Data Buffalo. https://data.buffalony.gov/Government/Census-Tracts-2020/9f79-wnbd/about_data.

Bureau, United States Census. 2025. “2018 Census Data: Social Characteristics.” Open Data Buffalo. https://data.buffalony.gov/Economic-Neighborhood-Development/2018-Census-Data-Social-Characteristics/7qc2-k6nr/about_data.

Cambell, Olivia. 2025. “Top 10 Most Dangerous Cities in New York State (2025).” https://www.arcadian.ai/fr/blogs/blogs/top-10-most-dangerous-cities-in-new-york-state-2025#:~:text=1.,on%20violent%20crime%20per%20capita.

Department, Buffalo Police. 2017. “Crime Incidents.” Open Data Buffalo. https://data.buffalony.gov/Public-Safety/Crime-Incidents/d6g9-xbgu/about_data.

R Core Team. 2022. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.

Survey, American Community. 2025a. “2019 Census Data: Social Characteristics.” Open Data Buffalo. https://data.buffalony.gov/Economic-Neighborhood-Development/2019-Census-Data-Social-Characteristics/xyey-cryp/about_data.

———. 2025b. “2020 Census Data: Social Characteristics.” Open Data Buffalo. https://data.buffalony.gov/Economic-Neighborhood-Development/2020-Census-Data-Social-Characteristics/dyhb-zw8e/about_data.

———. 2025c. “2021 Census Data: Social Characteristics.” Open Data Buffalo.

———. 2025d. “2022 Census Data: Social Characteristics.” Open Data Buffalo. https://data.buffalony.gov/Economic-Neighborhood-Development/2022-Census-Data-Social-Characteristics/frtj-fb32/about_data.

———. 2025e. “2023 Census Data: Social Characteristics.” Open Data Buffalo. https://data.buffalony.gov/Economic-Neighborhood-Development/2023-Census-Data-Social-Characteristics/bbre-upx9/about_data.

Footnotes

1. The map is from (Bureau of Census 2025). The crime data is from (Department 2017).

2. The data for figure 2 was obtained from Bureau (2025), Survey (2025a), Survey (2025b), Survey (2025c), Survey (2025d), Survey (2025e).